[mythtv-users] blue box in place of video, but no secondary output involved

[Sam Hooker]

Hi folks,

Please accept my apologies if this is old hat by now (and point me at the preexisting answer), but I have an issue that seems like it's related to display resolution (or possibly aspect), and I haven't been able to suss it, yet. I'm not new to Myth, but this one has me running in circles.

I have a single master backend (CentOS 5, Myth 0.23), and three frontends: two Mac laptops using Psychosis builds, and one CentOS 5 box as the "main TV" doing nothing but standard def. The Macs work fine, playing live TV and recorded content over 802.11g wireless without fail. I recently converted the backend and the main TV unit to CentOS due to long-standing "Fedora Lifecycle Fatigue". Packages install without a hitch, and the frontend UI comes up and functions as I would expect on the stand-alone frontend box (connected via Gbit Ethernet).

The problem is that there's no video displayed when I view live TV, recorded programs, or DVD content on the stand-alone frontend. The audio's there, and the control keys work as expected. This seems a common issue when using TV-out or otherwise juggling multiple available video outputs, but this is a Dell Optiplex GX260 with nothing but a VGA out. I've tried some of the startup flags recommended for those other cases anyway, including explicitly declaring '-display :0.0', with no improvement. I've also played with "separate video modes for UI and playback" with no luck.

I did, from previous frontend builds, have xine specified as the DVD player, but saw that its use is now discouraged in favor of the internal player. I've since dumped all the records associated with this node from the settings table and started over. Still no joy.

When I initially installed the OS and Myth on this box at my workbench with an old monitor at 1024x768, it displayed the live TV and recorded programs fine. (I didn't test DVD playback, at that point.) It's only since deploying and connecting it to a 1600x1200 monitor that this has come up. If I run a FreeNX session to this box and start the frontend through it, the video is displayed as expected on my laptop. 

X and I have never exactly been good buddies -- I'm a Linux server guy, but do my workstation stuff on Macs -- so it's entirely possible that there's something simple that's FUBARed, and I'm not savvy enough to detect it. I've attached my (extremely minimal) xorg.conf and mythfrontend.log (the errors in which appear to be either peripherals I'm not worried about right now, fonts, and the background window for the default theme), for your perusal.

Is it possible that my graphics controller is too crappy for the job? My previous frontend machines have been *much* older than this one, and I've always used the on-board graphics:

[sth at eowyn ~]$ /sbin/lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)


Or do I need to muck with "separate video modes for UI and playback" some more? In any event, thanks in advance for considering this!


Cheers,

-sth
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